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Division Spotlight
Operations & Power
Members focus on the dissemination of knowledge and information in the area of power reactors with particular application to the production of electric power and process heat. The division sponsors meetings on the coverage of applied nuclear science and engineering as related to power plants, non-power reactors, and other nuclear facilities. It encourages and assists with the dissemination of knowledge pertinent to the safe and efficient operation of nuclear facilities through professional staff development, information exchange, and supporting the generation of viable solutions to current issues.
Meeting Spotlight
ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
Standards Program
The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Latest News
First astatine-labeled compound shipped in the U.S.
The Department of Energy’s National Isotope Development Center (NIDC) on March 31 announced the successful long-distance shipment in the United States of a biologically active compound labeled with the medical radioisotope astatine-211 (At-211). Because previous shipments have included only the “bare” isotope, the NIDC has described the development as “unleashing medical innovation.”
Kaushik Banerjee, William R. Martin
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 174 | Number 1 | May 2013 | Pages 30-45
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE11-94
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Monte Carlo point detector and surface crossing flux tallies are two widely used tallies, but they suffer from an unbounded variance. As a result, the central limit theorem cannot be used for these tallies to estimate confidence intervals. By construction, kernel density estimator (KDE) tallies can be directly used to estimate flux at a point, but the variance of this point estimate does not converge as 1/N, which is not unexpected for a point quantity. However, an improved approach is to modify both point detector and surface crossing flux tallies directly by using KDE within a variance reduction approach and taking advantage of the fact that KDE estimates the underlying probability density function. This methodology is illustrated by several numerical examples and shows numerically that both the surface crossing tally and the point detector tally converge as 1/N (in variance), and both are asymptotically unbiased.